This post is part of Wavelength, a series of guest curated sound art and music mixes.

Still from the music video for Mount Kimbie, "Carbonated."

"What do you want to make of your life? A cruel question, when it is not a naïve one. What is a life if not a definitive unmaking? Whatever the gibberings of profane man, it is not open to us to make anything of ourselves."

–Nick Land, The Thirst For Annihilation

"Perhaps the young of this generation haven't the stamina to launch the epochal transformation they seek; but there should be no mistaking the fact that they want nothing less. 'Total rejection' is a phrase that comes readily to their lips, often before the mind provides even a blurred picture of the new culture that is to displace the old."

–Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture

Alvin Toffler's seminal book Future Shock (1970) posited the modular man, the disposable person, as one of the fundamental units and products of an urban, post-industrial society. We interact with specific modules of a person rather than the full human.

In conjunction with This is the ENDD and at the invitation of event presenter Mathew Dryhurst, Aaron David Ross of Gatekeeper has compiled a mixtape exploring the vape aesthetic. The resulting work is available to stream and download below, along with a statement by ADR. The compilation will be given a public premier tomorrow at Beverly's (21 Essex St New York, NY 10002), following the conclusion of the conference, at 630pm.

A still from an online clip of Wong Kar-Wai's Days of Being Wild (1991) incorporated into Masha Tupitsyn's Love Dog (2013), a transmedia publishing project

Rebekah Weikel founded Penny-Ante Editions, a Los Angeles-based publisher of literary works by artists, writers, and musicians. This post is part of Wavelength, a series of guest curated sound art and music mixes.

Masha Tupitsyn's Love Dog, which we commissioned at Penny-Ante Editions, was originally published as a series of posts on Tumblr from November 2011 to December 2012. In its online form, Love Dog married diaristic and critical writing while incorporating wide-ranging samples (music, recorded interviews, photographs, films, and texts) as expressions of authorial intent. The project explores "love" and (the) "loss" (of): grief as it unfolds, narrated diaristically.

As Masha told make/shift in 2013:

I met someone, it rattled me to the core, and I felt called upon to write about it in some roundabout, uncategorizable way that would still examine all the other social, political, and philosophical issues that I have always been concerned with. Tumblr allowed me to write the kind of interactive, associative, experimental, and discursive criticism that I have always wanted to write and that directly responds to the digital structure that now informs and organizes our lives.

This post is part of Wavelength, a series of guest curated sound art and music mixes.

In a 2006 article for TATE Etc. entitled "Black Moods," Gabriel Ramin Schor surveyed the color black's appearance in the Western art historical canon, and in doing so reminded us of the way Goethe referred to color as "troubled light." From black metal theory to black power; the black screen of a DOS terminal to Olbers' paradoxical blackness of the night sky, I've always been attracted to concepts associated with blackness myself. Crossing from the visual to the aural, as a sound artist and occasional DJ, I was moved to respond to some of what I thought was at stake in Black Midi in the form of a nonchalantly sequenced mixtape qua media-archaeological romp through the archive.

The flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. He is thus in the same
situation as the commodity. He is unaware of this special situation,
but this does not diminish its effects on him, it permeates him
blissfully, like a narcotic that can compensate him for many
humiliations. The intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the
intoxication of the commodity immersed in a surging stream of
customers. -- Walter Benjamin, 1938

A phantasmagoric journey through mid-20th century Country-Western
music inspired by Walter Benjamin’s "The Paris of the Second Empire in
Baudelaire."

Like the poet as flâneur in Benjamin’s essay, the country singer holds
a position as the susceptible vessel that embodies the incongruities
and ruptures characteristic of modern life. Neither an active symptom
nor proprietor of a solution for the social ills, the singer finds
himself drawn into the intoxicating world of empathetic relations to,
with and as commodity. We hear, perhaps more clearly then in
Baudelaire, a voice speaking not from the elevated position of a
social commentator or critic, but as the desire of the commodity and
commodified. Connoisseurs of narcotics sing empathetic odes to
inanimate objects and intoxicants, fortifying themselves in homes that
are really bars. Hobos, trashmen and ragpickers walk the street
collecting and picking through the worn out, exhausted items that have
escaped our economy of exchange: the antiques of modernity, the images
of obsolescence. The perpetual peregrinator, a rambling man,
heroically stripped of the comforts of modern life finds himself
stalking graveyards and mourning a loss that has yet to occur, the
final refuge of his own death. In a way these songs embody the last
gasp of a failed American politics, the moment before county western
music slips into an emphatic listing of personal property as banal as
Rick Ross’ "Trilla." The tragedy of our era is that the latent
revolutionary desires present in Hank Williams Jr.’s "Fax Me a Beer"
(not included in this mix) are forever doomed to find their outlet in
an inane fantasy of endless technological advancement.

This post is part of a new monthly series of guest curated mixes for the Rhizome blog, entitled Wavelength.

JAPANESE NOISE: A REMINDER

Compiled Summer 2012 by C. Spencer Yeh

Back
when I was an undergraduate and involved with college radio, we would hold
educational meetings covering a wide variety of music by genre, artist, and
geography. I was very much in thrall of the Japanese musical underground
at the time, so I developed a presentation and this was the handout I made as
an accompaniment. [See above.]

I’ve
noticed
the term ‘noise’ thrown around quite a bit lately, to encompass
particular
variations of form, ideology, and even affect, within organized sound
culture.
I generally have no qualms with what 'noise' can now
mean and manifest. With that said, Japanese noise is my preeminent
definition of 'noise'–my first and most formative experience. The birth
and development of Japanese noise is singular, defined by
its relation to time and place, to culture and aesthetic. Japanese
noise taught me about freedom, fetish, listening, autodidactism,
self-mythology, self-publishing, senzuri.

The
selections for this mix date from the mid-'80s to the early '00s, are edited for length, and intentionally eschew the
array of strategies in the scene (often deployed under the same project name) to focus on NOISE.
Big parties can be a blast, but once in a while, a long visit with an old
friend is incredibly fulfilling and necessary.

Wavelength is a new series for Rhizome’s blog that will
examine sound art and music, with some attention towards the technologies that
enable them. One significant aspect of Wavelength will be thematic guest
curated mixes, which will appear on the blog monthly.